Pagini

vineri, 21 martie 2014

After two release candidates, the Blender Foundation has now released Blender 2.70
New features include initial support for volumetrics in Cycles, and
faster rendering of hair and textures. The motion tracker now supports
weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking. For mesh modeling
there are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers, along with more
control in the bevel tool. The game engine now supports object levels of
detail.
The first results from the new user interface project are also in
this release, with dozens of changes to make the interface more
consistent and powerful. This is also the first release of the
multithreaded dependency graph, which makes modifier and constraint
evaluation faster in scenes with multiple objects.

Cycles now has initial support for volume rendering including
emission, absorption and scattering. Volume rendering can be used to
render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many
other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone.
CPU rendering performance was improved, particularly for hair, textures and Open Shading Language.

Trackers can now be weighted, to keep the result stable as feature
disappear or become difficult to track. The plane track workflow was
improved to be easier to control. Automatic feature detection was made
more robust using a new detector algorithm.

The toolbar now has tabs to organize tools in categories. Multiple
buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color
channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and
units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips,
buttons, menus and more.

The Laplacian Deform modifier was added to pose a mesh while
preserving geometric details of the surface, and a new wireframe
modifier allows you transform your mesh into a wireframe representation.
The boolean modifier now supports ngons, and there are improvements to
the bevel, screw and triangulate modifiers.
The bevel tool now offers more control over the bevel profile and results, and the knife tool was improved as well.

An important change that happened under the hood is the threaded
dependency graph. This means that object modifiers and constraints,
among other things, can now be computed with multiple threads taking
advantage of multicore processors. This will be most noticeable with
scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers.
This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more
powerful.

The Blender game engine now supports discrete level of detail for
meshes. For game developers, support for working with Photoshop PSD
files has been added.
A new view navigation walk mode has been added, which has a
control scheme as typically found in first person shooter games. This
can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game.

Many small changes and features were done all over Blender. Some
notable new feature are normalized display for FCurves, derivative map
baking, baking to vertex colors, better visualization of masks and
control over mask filling, gravity option for sculpting, negative
texture values to support vector displacement and a Lamp Data shading
node to create more customized NPR shaders.

luni, 17 martie 2014

Makehuman is an open source 3D computer graphics application designed for the prototyping of photo realistic humanoid to be used in 3D computer graphics. It is developed by a community of programmers, artists, academics interested in 3D modeling of characters.

The MakeHuman team is pleased to announce the release of MakeHuman 1.0.0, a free, open source tool for creating 3D virtual avatars, game characters or biologically realistic humans. Users can build 3D characters by simply dragging sliders to modify features (E.g. age, gender, weight, height, muscles, etc.). MakeHuman also provides libraries which allow you to automatically fit hairstyles and clothes to the character. The software aims to be user friendly, intuitive and at the same time provide a professional output.
All the content created with MakeHuman is licensed under one of the most liberal licenses in the world, offering artists unprecedented freedom to use their MakeHuman creations in any way they can imagine (“No Rights Reserved” CC0 license).
Makehuman provides its own exchange format the mhx (MakeHuman eXchange) which allows for importing of a fully rigged model into blender with IK/FK and control bones allowing for easy animation.

sâmbătă, 15 martie 2014

Download.com giveaway - Cyberlink PhotoDirector 4

Cyberlink PhotoDirector 4 comes packed with a complete set of photo
editing tools, so you can manually adjust the color, saturation, white
balance, and more, but you'll also find that there are Preset options,
so you can easily choose a theme, set it and share it - just like many
of the mobile photo editing apps. If you are into landscape photography,
the HDR effect is a nice feature that helps you create dramatic-looking
HDR scenario from a single photo.

In order to get the freebie, you will need to follow these steps closely:

Enter in your name, email address, and this code - PHD4CNET. This is very important - you must enter this code in.

Once you enter in the code, your license keys for both
Mac
and Windows version will be provided to you. Not only do you get a key
for your Windows machine, you can install one for your Mac too, or give
it to a friend.

Once you go through the installation process, you will need to enter
in the license key. Otherwise, you will not be able to access this
software, so make a note of these license keys. You should also receive
an email with the info, but just to be safe, I would screenshot it or
save it.

There you have it. You now have a great piece of photo editing
software that is easy and fun to use for free. The free giveaway
promotion starts now and ends at 11:59pm PT on Sunday, March 16, 2014,
or whenever we run out.

joi, 13 martie 2014

Anyone with the right set of tools can partition a hard drive. Aomei
Technology aims to make the process even easier by bringing you these
tools absolutely free with its Partition Assistant Pro giveaway. From
March 12, 2014, to March 19, 2014, you can get the popular professional disk-management utility at no cost, exclusively on Download.com.

Why partition your hard drive?

Partitioning tells your computer to treat different portions of your
hard disk as separate drives. This makes creating backups faster and
easier, as most data backup tools target entire disks. Keep essential
files (like the OS) on one partition and back them up regularly while
saving dispensable files on another. Create a separate boot partition
and load it with diagnostic tools in case your main operating system
fails. This can save you the scramble of finding a USB or CD to
troubleshoot issues. Older brand-name computers come with recovery
images saved in hidden partitions that may be outdated. Update them with
your own image to get going faster in case of a meltdown. Lastly, if
you're thinking of experimenting with other OSs (like Linux or SteamOS),
you can section off portions of your drive without having to back up
and format.

Aomei Partition Assistant Pro

One of the most highly rated tools among our editors and users, Aomei
Partition Assistant Standard Edition is our go-to free disk-managing
utility to resize/move, migrate OS, create, delete, format, align
partition, and convert between file systems (NTFS to FAT32). Partition
Assistant Pro gives you all the same tools as Partition Assistant
Standard, plus additional functions such as converting between MBR and
GPT, converting dynamic disk to basic, and dynamic disk/volume
management.

How to get it

You can get Partition Assistant Pro for free (regularly $36) just by visiting this link between March 12, 2014, and March 19, 2014.
Alternatively, you can download the installer and activate with the license code AOPR-L79S3-VJVU6-9WX1H

Collage away! Pick from 60 different templates or
customize one, and choose from 16 backgrounds. Upload up to 30 photos to
mix and match. Finish off your masterpiece with the border color or
pattern that catches your eye.

joi, 6 martie 2014

Krita, the ultimate weapon in the armoury of a Linux-based digital painter's, just got updated. New tools make it more interesting for creating game art, and full Windows support is a bit of a game changer.

What's new

For Krita, the last six months of work equal to an astonishing amount of new features, such as:

Wrap Around mode to create seamless tiled textures from your current artwork ((use theWkey, works in OpenGL mode only);

Clone Array tool to create isometric tiles.

New high-quality scaling mode for the OpenGL-based canvas.

Picking a layer by pressingRand clicking on a feature from that layer.

Configurable transparency visualization.

New dockable dialog to manage color swatches.

Easy expansion of canvas (deliberately not like in MyPaint, by users' request).

Composition guides in the Crop tool.

Some of these features were requested and actively tested in production by Paul Geraskin who extensively used Krita to createart for SuperCity gameplayed by over 4 mln of people.

Krita has an experimental implementation of aG'MIC pluginnow as well, and that alone increases the amount of available effects by order of magnitude.

Additionally, during Google Summer of Code 2013 one of the students applied tons of fixes to existing filters (both UI and algorithms), added alpha channel to the Curves filter, improved the HSV filter and the Dodge/Burn filters, and implemented a whole new Color Balance filter.

You can find plenty more details about new features in official illustratedrelease notes(PDF).

Tablets support

Support for graphic tablets got a huge boost in Krita 2.8. Dmitry Kazakov wrote his own code to support Wacom and uc­logic-based tablets instead of using buggy API from Qt.

As the result, these tablets just work on both Linux and Windows now. Various graphic tablets from Wacom andHuionhave been tested, as well as built-in digitizers in laptops like the Lenovo Helix.

Krita on Windows

This new release makes Krita a fully supported Windows application, for the first time in two years of working on the port.

Additionally, Krita Sketch (new UI finetuned for tablets) that was a Windows-only feature is now available on Linux as well. At the same time, on Windows, the hybrid of classical Krita and Krita Sketch called Krita Gemini will be available throughValve's Steam.

Downloading

Mac builds of Krita are still a work in progress. Making the app available on an operating system other than Linux involves doing extra work like stripping KDE libraries to a bare minimum like widgets, archive handling, plugin loading etc. Things will be easier when Krita starts using KDE frameworks which is expected to be a v3.0 feature (and there will be a v2.9 first)

Since last year KO GMBh providescommercial supportfor Krita which a few studios already use. The money is used on full-time development. If you feel like supporting development of Krita, you also havevarious optionslike donating or buying training DVDs.

Future plans

The Krita team is currently discussing what features they will be focusing on in the next development cycle. As of now, two improvements are likely to make it to v2.9.

First of all, there have been some ongoing work by Boudewijn Rempt on multidocument interface support (MVC branch in Git). The idea is to create a flexible view model that supports image strips, a flipbook, tabs, and “classical” MDI windows. Boudewijn kindly shared a screenshot demonstrating MDI view mode:

Secondly, a group of students from Université de Toulouse led by Kévin Ottens is already working on support for brushpacks. This idea to create a simple file format for bundling and sharing sets of brushes betweens users and apps emerged last year during LGM in a discussion between developers of Krita, MyPaint, and GIMP (see ourdetailed coverage).

Work on the implementation of aanimation, that started as another GSoC project, is still in progress, but it's going to take some some time to complete it. Meanwhile simplistic layer-based animation is being added to Krita by another contributor.

miercuri, 5 martie 2014

PDF to X is used to convert PDF documents to Word (.doc)/WordPad
(.rtf) documents, HTML web pages, JPG/PNG/BMP/TIF/GIF/PCX/TGA images and
plain text files in batch mode. It works without Adobe Acrobat or Adobe
Reader, and has friendly interface, small size, accurate and fast
conversion ability.
It retains the original text, images, format and layout of PDF
documents in various output files as much as possible. Also, PDF to X
supports converting the password-protected PDF files and specifying page
range to convert (for DOC, RTF, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF, PCX, TGA
files), and supports converting the PDF files that have some
restrictions, such as Content Copying, Saving as Text, Page Extraction,
Printing are not allowed (for HTML and TXT files).

marți, 4 martie 2014

PT Photo Editor is an efficient application designed to solve all
common photo problems, bring your images to life and make them look
their best. You can easily correct color cast and exposure problem,
remove imperfections, and turn every photo into a work of art with your
creativity.